Such is the story of an hundred English Gardens, where trees will tell secrets, and the lawn holds memories, and the paths echo with footsteps out of the past.
The influence literature has on the mind is nowhere more traceable than in a garden. A dozen thoughts spring to the mind gathered out of the store cupboards of remembered reading at the sight of flowers, trees, sunlit walks, dark alleys. Trees call up romantic meetings, hollow trunks where lovers have posted their letters, dark shades where vows have been made, smooth trunks on which are carven twin hearts pierced by a single arrow and crowned with initials cut into the bark. Gloomy recesses under spreading boughs remind one of the hiding places of conspirators, of fugitives.
Sometimes, on a winter’s night, to look into the garden and see the trees toss and shake with an angry wind, or stand bare, bleak, and black against the sparkle of a frosty sky, some written thing comes quickly into the brain almost as if the printed letters stood out clear. There is one scene of winter and trees comes often to me very full and clear. It is from the beginning of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and heralds the entrance in the story of the immortal Mr. Pecksniff.
“The fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and, subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned up the rich brown earth and wrought a graceful pattern in the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt. About the stems of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that year; while others (hardy evergreens this class) showed somewhat stern and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs the sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.
“A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt in everything.
“An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music. The withering leaves, no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked the horses, and, with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening fields.
“It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves; but this wind, happening to come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humour on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they fled away, pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over each other, whirling round and round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into the air, and playing all manner of extraordinary gambols in the extremity of their distress. Nor was this good enough for its malicious fury; for not content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them, and hunted them into the wheelwright’s saw-pit, and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and, scattering the sawdust in the air it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove them on and followed on their heels!
