Children care far less for scent and perfection in a flower than they do for color, and, above all, for desirability and adaptability of form, this desirability being afforded by the fitness of the flower for the traditional games and plays. The favorite flowers of my childhood were three noble creatures, Hollyhocks, Canterbury Bells, and Foxgloves, all three were scentless. I cannot think of a child's summer in a garden without these three old favorites of history and folk-lore. Of course we enjoyed the earlier flower blooms and played happily with them ere our dearest treasures came to us; but never had we full variety, zest, and satisfaction till this trio were in midsummer bloom. There was a little gawky, crudely-shaped wooden doll of German manufacture sold in Worcester which I never saw elsewhere; they were kept for sale by old Waxler, the German basket maker, a most respected citizen, whose name I now learn was not Waxler but Weichsler. These dolls came in three sizes, the five-cent size was a midsummer favorite, because on its featureless head the blossoms of the Canterbury Bells fitted like a high azure cap. I can see rows of these wooden creatures sitting, thus crowned, stiffly around the trunk of the old Seckel Pear tree at a doll's tea-party.
By the constant trampling of our childish feet the earth at the end of the garden path was hard and smooth under the shadow of the Lilac trees near our garden fence; and this hard path, remote from wanderers in the garden, made a splendid plateau to use for flower balls. Once we fitted it up as a palace; circular walls of Balsam flowers set closely together shaped the ball-room. The dancers were blue and white Canterbury Bells. Quadrilles were placed of little twigs, or strong flower stalks set firmly upright in the hard trodden earth, and on each of these a flower bell was hung so that the pretty reflexion of the scalloped edges of the corolla just touched the ground as the hooped petticoats swayed lightly in the wind.
Hollyhocks in Garden of Kimball Homestead, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
We used to catch bumblebees in the Canterbury Bells, and hear them buzz and bump and tear their way out to liberty. We held the edges of the flower tightly pinched together, and were never stung. Besides its adaptability as a toy for children, the Canterbury Bell was beloved for its beauty in the garden. An appropriate folk name for it is Fair-in-sight. Healthy clumps grow tall and stately, towering up as high as childish heads; and the firm stalks are hung so closely in bloom. Nowadays people plant expanses of Canterbury Bells; one at the beautiful garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois, is shown on [page 111]. I do not like this as well as the planting in our home garden when they are set in a mixed border, as shown [opposite page 416]. Our tastes in the flower world are largely influenced by what we were wonted to in childhood, not only in the selection of flowers, but in their placing in our gardens. The Canterbury Bell has historical interest through its being named for the bells borne by pilgrims to the shrine at Canterbury. I have been delighted to see plants of these sturdy garden favorites offered for sale of late years in New York streets in springtime, by street venders, who now show a tendency to throw aside Callas, Lilies, Tuberoses, and flowers of such ilk, and substitute shrubs and seedlings of hardy growth and satisfactory flowering. But it filled me with regret, to hear the pretty historic name—Canterbury Bells—changed in so short a residence in the city, by these Italian and German tongues to Gingerbread Bells—a sad debasement. Native New Englanders have seldom forgotten or altered an old flower name, and very rarely transferred it to another plant, even in two centuries of everyday usage. But I am glad to know that the flower will bloom in the flower pot or soap box in the dingy window of the city poor, or in the square foot of earth of the city squatter, even if it be called Gingerbread Bells.
I think we may safely affirm that the Hollyhock is the most popular, and most widely known, of all old-fashioned flowers. It is loved for its beauty, its associations, its adaptiveness. It is such a decorative flower, and looks of so much distinction in so many places. It is invaluable to the landscape gardener and to the architect; and might be named the wallflower, since it looks so well growing by every wall. I like it there, or by a fence-side, or in a corner, better than in the middle of flower beds. How many garden pictures have Hollyhocks? Sir Joshua Reynolds even used them as accessories of his portraits. They usually grow so well and bloom so freely. I have seen them in Connecticut growing wild—garden strays, standing up by ruined stone walls in a pasture with as much grace of grouping, as good form, as if they had been planted by our most skilful gardeners or architects. Many illustrations of them are given in this book; I need scarcely refer to them; [opposite page 334] is shown a part of the four hundred stalks of rich bloom in a Portsmouth garden. There is a pretty semidouble Hollyhock with a single row of broad outer petals and a smaller double rosette for the centre; but the single flowers are far more effective. I like well the old single crimson flower, but the yellow ones are, I believe, the loveliest; a row of the yellow and white ones against an old brick wall is perfection. I can never repay to the Hollyhock the debt of gratitude I owe for the happy hours it furnished to me in my childhood. Its reflexed petals could be tied into such lovely silken-garbed dolls; its "cheeses" were one of the staple food supplies of our dolls' larder. I am sure in my childhood I would have warmly chosen the Hollyhock as my favorite flower.
The sixty-two folk names of the Foxglove give ample proof of its closeness to humanity; it is a familiar flower, a home flower. Of these many names I never heard but two in New England, and those but once; an old Irish gardener called the flowers Fairy Thimbles, and an English servant, Pops—this from the well-known habit of popping the petals on the palm of the hand. We used to build little columns of these Foxgloves by thrusting one within another, alternating purple and white; and we wore them for gloves, and placed them as foolscaps on the heads of tiny dolls. The beauty of the Foxglove in the garden is unquestioned; the spires of white bloom are, as Cotton Mather said of a pious and painful Puritan preacher, "a shining and white light in a golden candlestick improved for the sweet felicity of Mankind and to the honour of our Maker."
[Opposite page 340] is a glimpse of a Box-edged garden in Worcester, whose blossoming has been a delight to me every summer of my entire life. In my childhood this home was that of flower-loving neighbors who had an established and constant system of exchange with my mother and other neighbors of flowers, plants, seeds, slips, and bulbs. The garden was serene with an atmosphere of worthy old age; you wondered how any man so old could so constantly plant, weed, prune, and hoe until you saw how he loved his flowers, and how his wife loved them. The Roses, Peonies, and Flower de Luce in this garden are sixty years old, and the Box also; the shrubs are almost trees. Nothing seems to be transplanted, yet all flourish; I suppose some plants must be pulled up, sometimes, else the garden would be a thicket. The varying grading of city streets has left this garden in a little valley sheltered from winds and open to the sun's rays. Here bloom Crocuses, Snowdrops, Grape Hyacinths, and sometimes Tulips, before any neighbor has a blossom and scarce a leaf. On a Sunday noon in April there are always flower lovers hanging over the low fences, and gazing at the welcome early blooms. Here if ever,