Days and hours in a garden

by E. V. B.

V.

FEBRUARY.

Land of Mandragora and the Serpent Flower.

“There never was a juster debt

Than what the dry do pay for wet;

Never a debt was paid more nigh

As what the wet do pay for dry!”

February 13.—If the West Country farmer’s rhyme prove true this year, the “dry” will have a heavy debt to pay! Some of the gravel walks in the garden are quite green, along the sides where the almost ceaseless rain flows down. All our dressed stone—sun-dial, vases, steps—is discoloured and green, and will all have to be scrubbed with hot water and soap, like the rocks in the great rockery once described in the Gardener’s Chronicle (vol. xviii., p. 747). A large part of the grounds has been under water nearly all through the winter; the “wet,” however, in which they sometimes stand ankle deep for weeks, seems not to do any harm to the evergreens here; whilst we get from the floods charming landscape effects. I could almost wish the glassy meres, with their clear reflections of tree or sky, to be permanent.

I have been looking over and making notes of our Fir trees—we have only about a dozen or so, I am afraid! I find that Pinus Austriaca thrives better than any other here; it is a regret to me that we did not plant numbers more of them, instead of wasting years in trying to make Scotch Fir succeed. Spruce never seems to do well in this part of the country; we have two or three old Spruce Firs which are mere poles, and some much younger, which must be cut down to relieve our eyes from that garden misery, a sickly tree. Only in the “Fantaisie” are our Spruce Firs successful, and there, from overcrowding—for there are at least ten—they are well-nigh spoilt. This little spot has proved good for them, I imagine, because it was new ground, taken in from old unbroken pasture and well trenched. One or two others, full and healthy, of a few years’ growth, suddenly went off last summer; it was as if a blighting wind had scorched their branches, or lightning had seared them. I know no successful Spruce plantations anywhere in the neighbourhood. The soil is gravelly, with chalk and flint; and sometimes trees seem to strike their roots down into a subsoil—perhaps an intermittent layer of greensand—and then they go off. But this can scarcely be the only cause that so fatally affects our Firs. About 120 miles down west, there is a group of extremely fine Spruce Firs that I have known for the last thirty years, and when I visited them last year I found they had all gone off in the same way as ours here. Excelsa Grandis flourishes equally with Pinus Austriaca. One fine young plant in the “Fantaisie” was, as one says, “quite a picture” in the summer for the perfect symmetry of its form, and on the two topmost laterals were just two beautifully shaped upright green cones, crested with amber-coloured gum! I rejoiced in this young tree during all the season, but there is a fear since then that it may suffer in its growth from the premature effort. The Balm of Gilead Firs, a few of which we put in along one side of the turf walk, have failed entirely. I meant each to become a little rounded beauty, like that one planted by my father, which I remember long years since as a wonder of aromatic greenery; but these are grey and stunted, and they all wear such a look of age and decay as I fear we cannot long endure to see. The crisp leaves, however, are as sweet when crumpled in the hand as they ought to be. With two or three of these piteous little trees, the branches show, without losing stiffness, a certain tendency to droop or turn downwards at the extremities. It is rather curious, this droop, affected by a few individuals in a Fir plantation! For they do not begin life with that intention; the young tree may be just like any other for years, when suddenly one branch will be observed turned down, then another and another, till finally the whole thing is decided, and the tree becomes a “weeper,” as some call them. In a large plantation in Aberdeenshire, some years since, I knew one young Silver Fir out of all the others that grew itself into a drooping form, so that it seemed at last to draw down its branches close together as one would draw a cloak around one in the cold. It was then ten or twelve feet high, and now it must indeed be a remarkable object if it has grown and drooped at the same rate. Our Douglas Fir (Sir Bedivere) has known this temptation to droop, but evidently the feeling of the mass of his branches is dead against the idea, and it will come to nothing.