A NORTHAMPTONSHIRE GARDEN.
Life in the Winter takes on this aspect of waiting wonderment. While the rivers are in flood, and the fields are ruled with silver lines where the ditches are full, and the Sun uses them for a mirror; while the gulls are driven inland and follow the plough, and the starlings congregate in the open fields, we prepare our pageant of flowers against those days when the slumber of the earth is over, and the now purple hedgerows are alive with tender green. St. Francis of Assisi impressed the very sentiment on his friars, in bidding them make scented gardens of flower-bearing herbs to remind them of Him who is called “The Lily of the Valley,” and “The Flower of the World.”
So goes my workshop through the winter days, while a few pale ghosts of late Roses linger on the trees, sighing doubtless to themselves, like old gentlemen—“Ah, I remember this place before Autumn pulled down all the green leaves, and long before all that ground was laid out for seed plots.” And all the while my Roses are growing and, could one see into the colour chambers of the trees, into those wonderful studios hidden in the tiny cells, one would see these artists at work rivalling the blush of morning, the flames of fire, the white soul of innocence, the crimson of king’s robes, and the orange flush of sunset. There are men, I suppose, who know to a certain extent how the secretion of these wonderful colours is arranged; why this or that colour runs to flush a petal to the edge, or stays to dye only the flower’s heart. But it will ever be a marvel to me to see how these veins flow crimson, those hold orange, and those again hold a rich yellow. The work that creates the colour of a Pansy, that gives to the Sweet Peas those soft tints, that shapes and colours the trumpet flower of the Convolvulus, and builds the long horn of the sweet-scented Eglantine, gives one a joy to which few joys are equal, and a feeling of security with the great unknown things by which life is encompassed.
Looking again at the garden of promises, and thinking of it still as a graveyard with headstones, I see one which is, to me, particularly pleasant. It is by an old bush of lavender, the mother bush of my long hedge; I read it to be written like this:
HERE LIES
IMPRISONED IN THIS GREY BUSH
THE SCENT OF
LAVENDER
IT IS RENOWNED FOR A SIMPLE PURITY
A SWEET FRAGRANCE AND A SUBTLE