The Charm of Gardens

by Dion Clayton Calthrop

BORDER FACING THE STUDY WINDOW

That I see most clearly written over the spot where I tucked the hundred and one beautiful sisters in their bed of rich brown earth, and I am looking for the time when the graveyard shall begin to be green with the shafts of their first leaves. Besides these, there are the headsticks to the Carnations, but this patch of the graveyard is different since the tufts of Carnation grass make long grey lines against the brown earth. Somewhere, in each of these grey tufts, is hidden the beautiful germ of life that is growing, growing all the time, and the wonderful chemical process is at work there (for all the plants look so silent and quiet), that is mixing colours and rejecting colours, and is secreting wax, and preparing perfume. Of all moments in a garden this is to me the most wonderful. No glory of colour or variety of shape; no pageant of ripe Summer, or tender early day of Spring appeals to me quite in the way this silent time does, when a thousand unseen forces are at work. I have often wondered (being quite ignorant of the chemical side of this) what happens to that drop of fresh colour the bee brings like a careless artist flicking a brush. Sometimes in a Carnation of pure white, one flower, or two, will show a crimson streak—a sport, one calls it. But more curious still is the fringe edge of the Picotee. How, I have often asked myself, does the colour edge find its way to its proper place? How does the plant manage to produce just enough of that one colour to go round each of its flowers? I have stood by a row of these plants that I have just planted in some new bed, and wondered at the amazing industry going on within them. They are fighting disease, supplying themselves with proper nourishment, mixing colours, and building buds and stems. It is a regular dockyard of a place except that there is no sound. I imagine (quite wrongly, but merely because an instinct causes me to do so) a lot of orderly forces like little drilled men hard at work in green-grey suits. Those who work underground are not in green but are in white, but should they go above the surface they would change colour owing to contact with the light, and this is due to the presence of a matter called chlorophyll in the cells which gives plants their green colour.

The underground workers are hard at it always, getting water from the ground, and in this water are gases and minerals dissolved. The workmen send this up to those in the leaves. Those who work in the leaves are taking in supplies of carbonic acid gas from the air, and the leaves themselves are so formed as to get as much light as possible on one surface. When the light meets with the carbonic acid gas in the leaves starch is formed. This is distributed through the plant to the actual builders.

You stand over the row of Carnations all silent, all still, and yet here is this tremendous activity going on, building, distributing, selecting, rejecting. A thousand workmen making a flower.

The two sets of workers, in the roots and leaves, the one sending up water and nitrogenous matter, the other making starch, are manufacturing albumenoids for more building material. And it is more easy to think of such creatures at work since a plant, unlike an animal, has no stomach, or heart, or bloodvessels, and its food is liquid and gaseous.

Now of these marvels the greatest is that of the existence of life in the plant on exactly the same initial principles as the existence of life in man. That is the substance known as the protoplasm. It is too amazing for me, and too great a thing to be dealt with here, but, as I look at my silent dockyard, there are these protoplasms, in the cells of these plants, dividing into halves and, so to speak, nestling with fresh cells in walls of cellulose.

Think of the work actually going on beneath our eyes in the one matter of the starch factory in the plant, where the chlorophyll (the green colouring matter) separates the carbon from the carbonic acid, returns the oxygen to the air, and mingles the carbon and the oxygen and the hydrogen in the water and so makes this starch.

All this goes on when we open our windows of a morning and look out over the garden and see just a grey line of Carnations we planted over-night. The workers at the roots who are so busily engaged in sending up water, are also sending with it all those things the plant needs that they can get from the earth. Thus the water may contain iron, nitrogen, sulphur, and potash. All that goes from the roots to the leaves is called sap. This, when it comes to the leaves and all parts of the plant exposed to the light, transpires, and so keeps the plant cool.

The stem, on which the supreme work, the flower, will be born, is, in the case of our Carnations, divided into nodes and internodes, the nodes being those solid elbows one sees. It is towards the supreme work that our eyes are turned. It is part, if not chief part, of the pleasure of our vigil to look forward to the day when the first faint colour shows in the bursting bud. It is for this moment that we wait and wear out the chill of Winter. It is towards the idea of a resurrection that our thoughts, perhaps unconsciously, are fixed, to the knowledge that our garden is to be born again, fresh and new in colour, in warmth and sunshine. The very secret workings going on before our eyes, all that Heavenly workshop where none are ’prentices and all are master-hands, where the bee, and the ant, and the unseen insect in the air, go about their exact duties, give one, as Autumn declines into Winter and Winter rouses into Spring, some vague conjecture of the mighty magic of the growing world, where no particle of energy is ever wasted.