Days and hours in a garden

by E. V. B.

There is the kitchen garden, too! The fresh and brilliant beauty that just now it holds within its walls will soon be past, giving place to richer, more sober colours. Looking through the old ironwork of the gate, up the straight middle walk, there is such a splendour of brightly blended colour in the flowers on either side! As yet, they are in their prime; the key-note of colour is white—double Rockets, double white Pyrethrums, and white Pinks. Then, bending down over the walk, mixing in with the whiteness, glowing through leaf and branch in brilliant intervals of colour, are Roses—pink, crimson, blush; Annual Poppies, tender or dazzling in their hue; clouds of pale blue Delphinium, with spires of deepening blue over-topping all the rest. Just midway between the pink and crimson Roses, a Briar, wreathed about with small yellow blooms, hangs over the cross walks at the corner. Masses of low blue Campanula fill in below or between the larger flowers. Right at the end, another iron gate lets in the glimmering of cool shades beyond. A little wren’s nest is there, ensconced snugly in a bowery Clematis, half-way up the pillar; the nest cannot be seen so far off, but I know well how the small entrance hole is quite filled up with greedy little yellow beaks and gaping mouths! The little mother is hard at work for them, somewhere near—hunting the bark of an Elm, most likely. The golden wrens have brought out their families—two nestfuls. We found the nests hanging in the Yews, and now the garden seems to be full of little elfin scissors’ grinders, busy all day long.

The Parterr.

I have a fancy to open the gate and go all round the kitchen garden quite prosaically. The other garden will seem still sweeter, after. Here, on the left, is a breadth of wonderful Lettuces, round and close like small round Cabbages, with milk-white middles; and beyond, some taller and tied-up—more like Salad. Near the Lettuces are tall ranks of Peas, hung all over with well-filled pods. I think I like these beautiful green Peas, growing here, as much as when served up in a dish for dinner. There seems always to be something attractive to Art of all kinds in pea pods; from the pods sculptured on the great bronze gates of the cathedral at Pisa, or the raised needlework of the sixteenth century, to the ornaments in the jewellers’ shops of Paris or the portraits of Marrowfats or Telegraph Peas in the advertisement-sheets of gardening papers—these last being really pictures, though not meant so. I remember once being shown a white satin spencer of Queen Elizabeth’s, embroidered in butterflies and Green Pea pods half-open, to show the rows of peas within.

I think there is Beetroot, and a fine lot of young Cabbages, beyond the Peas—in which no one can feel any particular interest; and oh! such a sweet patch of seedling Mrs. Sinkins white Pink. I wish that Pink did possess a more poetical name—Arethusa or Boule de Neige! but the thing is done, and to the end of time Mrs. Sinkins will be herself. Next comes a little square of Japanese Iris, the tall stems tipped with swelling buds whose grand unfolding I long to see. Rows of young Sage plants grow near, quite unlike sage-green, so-called, in colour; and a nice little plantation of healthy-looking Fennel. That is for broiled mackerel; but there is to me another interest connected with Fennel, that lies in a lurking hope, always unfulfilled, of finding upon it a caterpillar of the rare Papilio regina. Caterpillars of another sort are only too multitudinous on the Currants growing up the walls. The increase of them, and of the sawflies belonging to them, is not short of miraculous. One may stamp out whole families and clear the bushes, and next morning they will be beginning again. Yet invariably in the act of destroying there creeps in a sort of questioning, whether the caterpillars have not full as good a right to the Currants as we have—except, indeed, that we, and not they, planted them. But the sawflies would seem to have at least a right to live—a greater right, perhaps, than we to have tarts; yet they are spared none the more for such-like uncomfortable reflections. On the south wall the fruit trees seem to be more or less flourishing. An old Nectarine is covered with fruit. Then comes Apricot tree No. 1, on which I find no Apricots; Nos. 2 and 3 the same, 4 dead, and 5 with “a good few” on it. Then we come to Peaches, plenty of them; then a beautiful dark-leafed Fig tree; and then the Cherries, well fruited and well netted. And so on round the walls. Near the wren’s nest there is another large patch of Pinks, commoner and better than any, with the neatest lacing of purple-madder or lake. And here a powerful fragrance stops one short; it is the strawberries, smelling deliciously. They are littered down with clean straw, and netted close, for the discomfiture of blackbirds. The scent takes me back a very long way—back to an inconceivable time, when this old smell of Strawberries, borne across the hedge in the hot noontide of some summer holiday, was reason enough to set us wild vagrants of the garden scrambling through the thorns to seize the exquisite delight of spoiling our neighbour’s Strawberries—a joy that was never marred, for we were never found out. Sun and rain have both been kind, and this is our second week of immense red Presidents, one of the oldest and best of strawberries—the older Caroline being now quite forgotten. The espaliers are showing plenty of Apples and Pears. Three Pear trees, standing at the four cross-ways, are curiously in bloom; the blossoms are all sickly-looking and undersized, but the trees are covered with them up to the very top, while fruit is set at the same time. I dislike this unnatural blooming, for the mind will persist in reverting to foolish sayings and superstitions connected with trees bearing fruit and flower at the same time.

Among the pleasant sights of this mid-summertide, perhaps the pleasantest of all is the great thicket of wild Roses growing within the wire network that bounds the tennis-lawn on the garden side. The east, shining full upon it every morning, brings forth hundreds of new-blown Roses. Very often, as you pass into their sweet presence from under the Plane trees, the air is redolent of a subtle perfume—not always, though, nor every day, for Roses are capricious of their scent. The yellow-stamened centre of each flower glows like a tiny lamp of gold, and the soft petals surrounding it are rose-pink of the tenderest dye. Were these the canker-blooms of Shakespeare? If so, and if in his day they could be said to “live unwooed, and unrespected die,” surely now the tide has turned, for the wild Rose is beloved of all; while we must confess that garden Roses now-a-days do not always “die sweet deaths.”

*****

July 22.—

“It is not growing like a tree

In bulk that makes man better be.