Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth

by Alice Morse Earle

Peonies in a Salem Garden.

Rhododendrons are to the modern garden what the Peony was in the old-fashioned flower border; and I am glad the modern flower cannot drive the old one out. They are equally varied in coloring, but the Peony is a much hardier plant, and I like it far better. It has no blights, no bugs, no diseases, no running out, no funguses; it doesn't have to be covered in winter, and it will bloom in the shade. No old-time or modern garden is to me fully furnished without Peonies; see how fair they are in this Salem garden. I would grow them in some corner of the garden for their splendid healthy foliage if they hadn't a blossom. The Pæonia tenuifolia in particular has exquisite feathery foliage. The great Tree Peony, which came from China, grows eight feet or more in height, and is a triumph of the flower world; but it was not known to the oldest front yards. Some of the Tree Peonies have finely displayed leafage of a curious and very gratifying tint of green. Miss Jekyll, with her usual felicity, compares its blue cast with pinkish shading to the vari-colored metal alloys of the Japanese bronze workers—a striking comparison. The single Peonies of recent years are of great beauty, and will soon be esteemed here as in China.

Not the least of the Peony's charms is its exceeding trimness and cleanliness. The plants always look like a well-dressed, well-shod, well-gloved girl of birth, breeding, and of equal good taste and good health; a girl who can swim, and skate, and ride, and play golf. Every inch has a well-set, neat, cared-for look which the shape and growth of the plant keeps from seeming artificial or finicky. See the white Peony on [page 44]; is it not a seemly, comely thing, as well as a beautiful one?

No flower can be set in our garden of more distinct antiquity than the Peony; the Greeks believed it to be of divine origin. A green arbor of the fourteenth century in England is described as set around with Gillyflower, Tansy, Gromwell, and "Pyonys powdered ay betwene"—just as I like to see Peonies set to this day, "powdered" everywhere between all the other flowers of the border.

White Peonies.

I am pleased to note of the common flowers of the New England front yard, that they are no new things; they are nearly all Elizabethan of date—many are older still. Lord Bacon in his essay on gardens names many of them, Crocus, Tulip, Hyacinth, Daffodil, Flower de Luce, double Peony, Lilac, Lily of the Valley.

A favorite flower was the yellow garden Lily, the Lemon Lily, Hemerocallis, when it could be kept from spreading. Often its unbounded luxuriance exiled it from the front yard to the kitchen dooryard as befell the clump shown [facing page 48]. Its pretty old-fashioned name was Liricon-fancy, given, I am told, in England to the Lily of the Valley. I know no more satisfying sight than a good bank of these Lemon Lilies in full flower. Below Flatbush there used to be a driveway leading to an old Dutch house, set at regular intervals with great clumps of Lemon Lilies, and their full bloom made them glorious. Their power of satisfactory adaptation in our modern formal garden is happily shown [facing page 76], in the lovely garden of Charles E. Mather, Esq., in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

The time of fullest inflorescence of the nineteenth century front yard was when Phlox and Tiger Lilies bloomed; but the pinkish-orange colors of the latter (the oddest reds of any flower tints) blended most vilely and rampantly with the crimson-purple of the Phlox; and when London Pride joined with its glowing scarlet, the front yard fairly ached. Nevertheless, an adaptation of that front yard bloom can be most effective in a garden border, when white Phlox only is planted, and the Tiger Lily or cultivated stalks of our wild nodding Lily rise above the white trusses of bloom. These wild Lilies grow very luxuriantly in the garden, often towering above our heads and forming great candelabra bearing two score or more blooms. It is no easy task to secure their deep-rooted rhizomes in the meadow. I know a young man who won his sweetheart by the patience and assiduity with which he dug for her all one broiling morning to secure for her the coveted Lily roots, and collapsed with mild sunstroke at the finish. Her gratitude and remorse were equal factors in his favor.