Days and hours in a garden

by E. V. B.

Of Cherry Blossoms—the Nightingale’s “Melodious Noise”—Of Broken Stones, etc., etc., etc.

May 6.—The month of May would be Heaven upon earth if only it came in August or September, when summer mostly begins! but such cold, hard weather as we have had spoils sadly our enjoyment of the blossom trees and all the pleasures of spring. There have been just one or two sweet days, when the white Cherry orchards shone softly against a sky of serenest blue; days when we did but revel in the joyous present, forgetting quite that ever it could be that “rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” Alas! all too soon our dream is dispelled; dark clouds arise, and we see “Heaven’s gold complexion dimmed,” and the orchard grass strewn with pearly wreck. The Cherry tree’s magic season is at an end; it seemed to last scarcely longer than a day. With the first hot shafts of April’s sun it startles into bloom, shaken out in snow-wreaths all over the tree, a waste of most lavish loveliness. It is something gained, once in the twelvemonth’s round of commonplace, if only for a moment to stand beside a Cherry tree in blossom. The blue sky looks infinitely far off, seen through such a maze of flowery myriads. And now Apple blossoms are coming on in rosy swift succession. How beautiful they are! and is it not time that water-colour artists should cease to weary, by attempting so vainly to pourtray them? (This only by the way.) They have the merit of lasting just long enough for us to enjoy them well; yet beautiful as they are, I do not know if they can ever quite compare with the frail short-lived cherry. If the Espaliers in the kitchen garden alongside the middle walk would but flower together all at once, that walk in May would be better than any picture-gallery. But our gallery walls perversely decorate themselves only a little bit at a time. One bit, at a corner of the cross-walks, is now in full perfection. A faint delicious perfume steals out through the iron gate to the flower-garden, inviting as one passes by, to turn and peep within. There are the trained leafless branches covered thick with knots of flower. They open very deliberately, and there abide for a little happy while, self-conscious, round, and pink, and firm; then there comes a setting of delicate green around the flowers; and then the Apple tree in bloom is one of earth’s loveliest sights. Apple blossom must be added to my pharmacopœia of sweet smells. To inhale a cluster of Blenheim Orange gives back youth for just half a minute after. It is not merely that with the perfume the heart goes back to remembered times—it is a real, absolute elixir! Our young Siberian Crab trees are like great white bouquets; and behind the pigeon-house there is a wonder of Japanese Apple (Pyrus malus floribunda). It is like a fountain of flowers, tossing its pink flower-laden branches in every direction. Blue Periwinkles creep over the ground underneath it. In the autumn I shall hope to plant several more of these lovely trees somewhere on the lawn, where we may see and enjoy them from the windows. And now the Primrose—

“Lady of the springe,

The lovely flower that first doth show her face;

Whose worthy prayse the pretty byrds do syng,

Whose presence sweet the wynter’s colde doth chase,”

has ceased to glad us “with worldes of new delightes.” She is on the wane, “with her bells dim”—as old Ben Jonson said; but I should not call them bells. She dies upon a bed of vivid green amidst tall grasses and her own thick-coming leaves, as stars grow pale before the dawn. And we are faithless to her beauty in the presence of other, fresher loveliness; and we care not though the Primrose is dead.

The Tulips in the parterr—it is the older and prettier way to spell it without an “e” at the end—are now the chief ornament of the garden and the delight of my eyes. Timely rains strengthened the stalks to rise to their full height, and there are the beds now, a blaze of scarlet and yellow splendour. There are tall Tulips and short Tulips, rose and crimson, scarlet and orange Tulips, striped and dashed, and brown and white, and every shade of Tulip colour. A few grow between little box and golden Arbor Vitæ bushes, and all the beds are deeply fringed with Crocus leaves. I am aware that as a matter of the highest principle, Tulips are seldom mixed; the colours are usually arranged separately. Long experience has taught me, however, to have nothing to do with principles—in the garden. Little else than a feeling of entire sympathy with the diverse characters of your plants and flowers is needed for “art in the garden.” If sympathy be there, all the rest comes naturally enough. No brighter, gayer garden scene can be imagined than on a sunny morning, turning the corner of a clipped Yew—buttressed out from the house—to come upon the parterr, decked in all its gay brilliancy of Tulips. The sculptured stone pillar rises from a little mound of Stonecrop in the centre, often with a pigeon or a thrush pluming itself on the top. Suddenly the little flock of fantail pigeons with whistling wings descend among the many-coloured brilliants, and there, in the emerald, dewy interspaces, they strut and play in their pride and purity of whiteness. My favourite Parrot Tulips do not as yet make much way; the lack of sunshine keeps their buds green. It was in Venice, years ago, that first I fell in love with Tulips such as these. On the marble altars of one of the great Jesuit churches were vases filled with Parrot Tulips, all cut-edged and gold and scarlet-splashed. The cloister garden behind the church was full of them. It is a strange disorderly beauty, and sometimes draggles and hangs its untidy head like a Bell-flower, and sometimes flaunts it up full in the sun’s face. There are Forget-me-nots in many parts of the garden; their long smoke-like lines of turquoise are specially pleasing. Two square beds in the entrance court, set between the black Yews, are also a success—Forget-me-not, flecked with pink Saponaria—they give the idea of blue mist touched by the sunset. In the Fantaisie, bushes of orange-coloured Berberis Darwinii are in great perfection of bloom. There is something peculiarly delightful in the way they have of spreading the earth with orange, while yet the laden boughs above own no apparent loss. The orange colour contrasts well also with a chance lot of purple Honesty, which has grouped itself round a smooth-stemmed young Mulberry at the end of the turf walk. The walk itself is very bright, with an irregular bordering of white and pink Phlox Nelsoni—a Cheiranthus, or a deep blue Gentian, here and there. The little low-growing Phlox comes in exquisite patches of colour all over the garden. When in flower, the plant itself—which is straggling and rather ugly—is completely hid by a flat mass of close-set bloom. In these “gardens on a level” I am always wishing for rockeries and little low terraces, which should be all draped with Convolvulus Mauristiana, Phlox Nelsoni, Aubretia, and wild Ivy and Alyssum, or something yellow. I should not much care for many rare Alpine plants, I think; though a surprise of the kind here and there would be charming. Colour I must have, and plenty of it, to rejoice the eye and make glad the heart.

A tract of wild, savage scenery, six square yards in extent, is in contemplation at the afforested end of the Fantaisie. Already one or two large pieces of a sort of conglomerate have been conveyed here, and are frowning in an open space amongst the wild Bluebells. There is a background of dark Arbor Vitæ, and beyond, the pleasant fields are seen, with the cows and Elms and an Oak tree. There exists a certain necessity for feature in this flattest of all places! The Yew hedges and pyramids have done much to give character to the flower garden, and now there must be rocks for variety.

A heap of fragments of an old headless statue lies near the rocky waste; part of a sitting figure—a hand and a foot—and lumps of heavy drapery, overlaid in beautiful green velvet of moss. Very forlorn the broken stones look, and I cannot decide to make them into rockwork. None now know whom the statue in its day was meant to represent—probably a garden goddess, Flora or Pomona—but its history is rather quaint, if not touching. It was beloved by a lady who lived here once, and hated by her sister, and according as each for the time reigned in the other’s absence, it was set up in a niche of the garden wall, or cast down with ignominy. At last the sister who loved the statue died, and then it was broken to pieces, and flung down a well. It was fished up again long after, before our time. Tradition tells of another statue, an image of Old Time, that stood or sat at one end of the pond in “the park,” but of this there remains no trace.