Days and hours in a garden

by E. V. B.

IV.

JANUARY.

Of Field-Mice, and the Thorn of Joseph of Arimathea—Of “Poor Johnnys”—A Lilac Gem—and Greenhouse Flowers.

January 5, 1883.—A large body of the army of the small ones of the earth has attacked us, and it is no fault of theirs if we are not despoiled of the best of our spring delights. The field-mice have at length found out the Crocuses; we, on our side, have set traps in their way, and large numbers have fallen—quite flat, poor little things!—under the heavy bricks. We believe we should have slain many more, had not some clever creature made a practice of examining the traps during the night, devouring the cheese, and in some way withdrawing the bit of stick, so as to let the brick fall harmless. Suspicion points towards one person especially—the old white fox-terrier, who lives in the stables, and is master (in his own opinion) of all that department, and whom neither gates nor bars can prevent going anywhere he chooses to go. “Impossible!” says he, with Mirabeau; “don’t mention that stupid word!” Up to this time field-mice have not troubled us much. In the days when there was always a hawk or two hovering over the ploughed land, or keeping watch over the green meadows, and when we used to hear the owls in the summer nights, and saw the white owl who lived somewhere near by sail silently in the grey of evening across the lawn—in those days we knew little of the plague of field-mice. But now we have changed all that; cheap gun licences have put a gun into every one’s hand, the vermin is ruthlessly shot, and the balance of Nature is destroyed.

It is rather a fearful pleasure that we take just now to mark the unwonted earliness of green things of all kinds. One cannot help dreading that some great check will happen later on in the year; and yet it may be an omen for good that the birds’ full concert has only just begun, in these dark mornings, amongst the trees of the garden. The saying goes in Scotland, “If the birds pipe afore Christmas they’ll greet after;” and so far as I know, not a note was sung till December 30. The birds served our Hollies a good turn at Christmas. In November the Hollies were scarlet with berries, and one thought with a shudder of how they would have to suffer, when the time came for Christmas decorations; then occurred two short severe frosts, and, to my joy, the Holly trees were swept clear of every tempting spot of scarlet before Christmas, and thus were saved the customary reckless breaking and tearing of branches. Dear birds! Does any one ever think, I wonder, sitting in the summer shade near “some moist, bird-haunted English lawn,” how dull it would be without them—how much they enhance for us the grace and charm of the garden and the country? It is their gay light-heartedness that is so delightful, and that we should miss so much if they were not there. Who ever saw a grave bird?—at least I mean a grave little one—the bigger the sadder it is, with them. Their very labours of nest-building, and of feeding their young ones, are done like a merry bit of child’s play! The birds’ never-failing interest in life is like a sort of tonic to those who love them. Michelet felt this when he called them “des êtres innocents, dont le mouvement, les voix, et les jeux, sont comme le sourire de la Création.”

I do not remember having seen before in mid-winter a Hawthorn hedge bursting out into leaf! At the end of last month, however, there were strong young shoots and fully formed leaves on some of the Quicks in a hedge planted last spring in our lane. I have known nothing like this, except the Glastonbury Thorn. There is one of these strange Thorns, a large tree, growing just within the park gates of Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire. It used to bloom with great regularity in mild winters about this time. Tufts of flowers came all over the branches, smelling as sweet as Hawthorn in May. I have often cut a long spray all wreathed with pearly bloom, on New Year’s Eve, in former years. The flowers come with scarce a sign of leaf about them, and they are rather smaller than those of the common May. The emerald green of turf, thickly sprinkled with Daisies, seems also an unusual sight for January. The first green glow on the grass and the first Daisy we are surely used to hail as signs of approaching spring. On the lawn, too, a yellow Buttercup, careless of the heavy roller, has dared to hold up its head!

The Boccage and Part of the Fantaisie
1. Glorietta. 2 Large Elm and line of same
3 Border of Blue Gentian. 4. Pigeon House
Grass Paths & & &.... (click image to enlarge)

Jan. 8.—The weather has been for many weeks so dark and gloomy, that the rare sunshine which shone upon the land to-day was as welcome and nearly as unlooked for as May flowers in January. The house stood blocked out in sun and shadow. Magnolia Grandiflora, which covers the south-east gable, looked grand in this flood of radiance. Standing before it, the refrain of a wild canzonetta I once heard, chanted forth lazily in the little sun-steeped piazza of an old Italian town, came back to the mind’s ear—“Oh, splendid bella!” The eye, soon tired, however, of so much dazzling brilliance in the polished foliage, each leaf reflecting back the sun, follows the ascending lines of beauty up above the pointed roofs, where the soft golden rust of the topmost leaves’ inner lining meets the deep blue, cloudless sky. Next the Magnolia, just under the painting-room window, is a Flexuosa Honeysuckle which has not lost a leaf this winter. New shoots and twists of brightest green, set with young leaves two and two, are springing all over it. One tender shoot, indeed, has had the heart to curl twice round a branch, sending out a length of spray beyond.