The Arts of Rome were dead, buried, and cut up by the plough. (How many ploughmen, such as Chaucer knew, turned long brown furrows over Roman vineyards, and black crows, following, pecked at bright coins, brought by the plough to light.)
All at once, it must have seemed, the culture of flowers, was in the air: Carnations became the rage; then men spent heaven knows what on a Tulip bulb; built orangeries; sent Emissaries abroad to cull flowers in the East. The great men’s gardeners, great men themselves, kept flowers in the plot of ground about their cottages; gave out a seed or so here and there; talked garden gossip at the village ale-house. (Tradescant steals Apricots from Morocco into England. A Carew imports Oranges. The Cherry orchards at Sittingbourne are planted by one of Henry the Eighth’s gardeners. Peiresc brings all manner of flowers to bloom under our grey skies: great numbers of Jessamines, the clay-coloured Jessamine from China; the crimson American kind; the Violet-coloured Persian.)
A SURREY COTTAGE.
The grass piece by the cottage door begins to find itself cut into beds; uncared for flowers, wild Gilly-flowers, Thyme, Violets and the like, give colour to the cottage garden that has only just become a garden. With that comes competition: one man outdoes another, begs plants and seeds of all his friends; buds a Rose on to a Briar standard, and boasts the scent of his new Clove Pinks, And so it grew that times were not so strenuous: Queen Victoria comes to the throne, and with prosperity come the pretty frillings of life, and cottage gardens ape their masters’ Rose walks, and collections of this and that. To-day Africa and Asia nod together in a sunny cottage border, and Lettuces from the Island of Cos show their green faces next to Sir Walter Raleigh’s great gift to the poor man, the Potato. Poplars from Lombardy grow beside the garden gate; the Currant bush from Zante drips its jewel-like fruit tassels under a Cherry tree given to us, indirectly, by Lucullus, lost by us in our slumbering Saxon times, and here again, with Henry the Eighth’s gardener, from Flanders. In some quite humble gardens the Cretan Quince and Persian Peach grow; so that history, poetry, and romance peer over Giles’s rustic hedge; and the wind blows scents of all the world through the small latticed window.
Ploughman Giles, sitting by his cottage door, smoking an American weed in his pipe while his wife shells the Peas of ancient Rome into a basin, does not realise that his little garden, gay with Indian Pinks and African Geraniums, and all its small crowd of joyous-coloured flowers, is an open book of the history of his native land spread at his feet. Here’s the conquest of America, and the discovery of the Cape, and all the gold of Greece for his bees to play with. Here’s his child making a chain of Chaucer’s Daisies; and there’s a Chinese mandarin nodding at him from the Chrysanthemums; and there’s a ghost in his cabbage patch of Sir Anthony Ashley of Wimbourne St. Giles in Dorsetshire.
Ploughman Giles is a fortunate man, and we, too, bless his enterprise and his love of striking colours and good perfumes when we lean over the gate of his cottage garden to give him good-day.
I showed him once a photograph of a picture by Holbein—the Merchant of the Steel Yard—and pointed out the vase of flowers on the table and the very same flowers growing side by side in his garden, Carnations, the old single kind, and single Gilly-flower. He looked at the picture with his glasses cocked at the proper angle on his nose—he’s an oldish man and short-sighted—and said in his husky voice, “Well, zur, I be surprised to zee un.” And he called out his wife to look—which didn’t please her much as she was cooking—but, when she saw the flowers, “In that there queer gentleman’s room, and as true as life, so they do be,” she became enthusiastic, wiped her hands many times on her apron, and looked from the picture to the actual flowers growing in her garden with a kind of awe and wonder. It was of far more interest to them to know that they were hand in glove with the history of their own country than it would have been to learn that chemists made a wonderful drug called digitalis out of the Foxgloves by the fence. I gave them the photograph and it hangs in a proud position next to a stuffed and bloated perch in a glass-case; and, what is more, they have an added sense of dignity from the dim, far away time the picture represents to them.
“He might a plucked they flowers in this very garden,” she says; and indeed, he might if he had happened that way. But the older flowers, though they don’t realise it, are the people themselves. Ploughman Giles and his wife, have been on the very spot far, far longer than the Pinks and Gilly-flowers, blooming into ripe age, rearing countless families back and back and back, until one can almost see a Giles sacrificing to Thor and Odin at the stone on the hill behind the cottage. The Norman Church throws its shadow over the graves of countless Gileses, and over the graves, pleasant-eyed English Daisies shine on the grass.
After all, when we see a cottage standing in its glowing garden, with a neat hedge cutting it off from its fellows; with children playing eternal games with dolls (Mr. Mould’s children following the ledger to its long home in the safe—shall I ever forget that?), we see the whole world, cares, joys, birth, death and marriage; the wealth of nations scattered carelessly in flowers, spoils from every continent, surrounded by a hedge, its own birds to sing, its hundred forms of life, feeding, breeding, dying round the cottage door; and, at night, its little patch of stars overhead.