The Charm of Gardens

by Dion Clayton Calthrop

But what struck me most forcibly was the appearance of the graveyard, for each grave had flowers growing by it, and a little weeping willow planted to hang over it, and there was something so pleasant to me in this that I was filled with delight of the place as I sat there. It was a real garden, so fresh and bright with flowers and with ugly bead-wreaths as are so usual in foreign countries, and now, alas! in our own. And it was so homely to think of the elders of that place who sat looking at the graves and meditating—very likely—on the spot where they themselves would lie. I remembered then, as I sat there, the description of the graveyard in David Copperfield, and the words came almost exact into my head.

“One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.

“There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’”

Even as I remembered those words I looked up and noticed a sun-dial on the wall of the church just over my head, and, curiously enough, just that peace that those words give to me seemed to come to me from the sight of the sun-dial, and the repose of the scene before me.

It is good, I think, to meditate on these things, and all who garden, who are, as it were, in touch with the soil, must sometimes let their thoughts linger over the other gardens where the dead are, and where Spring comes as blithely as in any other spot.

Although the gardens that are what are called “show-places,” tended and nursed by a staff of men, do not bring one into such close contact with earth as earth, still in the greater garden is a peace no other place knows but the graveyard. This is no morbid thought, nor over introspective, but, I think, makes me feel more sanely and not so fearfully of death. In the same way do the poor keep their grave clothes ready and neat in a drawer, with pennies sewn up in linen to put over their tired eyes, and everything decent for the putting away of their bodies. So does the wood of trees enclose them, and good and polished wood in the shape of coffin-stools is there to bear them up. And I have heard many talk of how they wished to lie facing the porch of the church; and others who wished they might be near by the gate so that folks passing in and out might remember them.

AUTUMN COLOUR AT BONCHURCH OLD CHURCH, NEAR VENTNOR.

This may seem a subject not quite fitted to a book which is to tell of the Charm of Gardens, and yet I am sure lovers of gardens will know just what I mean. To think of and know of the peace and beauty of certain graveyards is to gain consolation and quietude such as the knowledge and thought of all beauty gives. What a wonderful thing it is that we can paint the earth with flowers, set here crimson, and there orange, here purple, and there blue; range our colours from white to cream, to deep cream, to all the shades of all the colours, to deep impenetrable purple, more black than black, like the dusky eyes of anemonies.

When it is night, and “the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon,” the thousand thousand Daisies of the fields have closed their eyes, and the Buttercups’ golden glaze is mellowed by the moonlight, still there are flowers gay in the sunshine somewhere in the world. Though the garden is chequered in the blue-green light and heavy shadows, and the owls hoot in their melancholy voices, still there are birds somewhere in the world singing. And though, across the way behind the wall, white in the moonlight, lies the dark churchyard, and all is very still there, still, I think, they, whose names are carved there on the stones, are not in the dark, and do not know the damp and mouldy earth, but are somewhere in some world more light and beautiful than this.