Days and hours in a garden

by E. V. B.

“Once a Dream did Weave a Shade.”...

“He who goeth into his garden to look for spiders and cobwebs will doubtless find them; but he who goes out to seek a flower may return to his house with one blooming in his bosom.”

III.

DECEMBER.

Of Spiders’ Webs, Christmas Roses, King Arthur,
and the Tree I Love.

December 6.—Among the strange and beautiful sights of the garden during the hard hoar-frost that ushered in the first days of the month, not the least beautiful were the spiders’ webs. Passing along the Larch Walk, the oak palings that divide us on that side from the new road (the old road, made by Richard, King of the Romans, in the thirteenth century, is now within the grounds) were hung all over with white rags—or so it seemed at first sight. And then, just for one second, that curious momentary likeness of like to unlike chanced. I remembered the street of palaces at Genoa, the day when I saw it last; the grand old walls covered with fluttering rags of advertisements—yes, advertisements in English: “Singer’s Sewing Machine.” The white rags on our palings were spiders’ webs both new and old, a marvellous number, thus crystallized, as it were, into existence by the frost, where scarcely one had been before. In open weather the webs are as good as invisible to human eyes; but now that frost had thickened the minutest threads to the size of Berlin wool—though in beauty of texture they resembled fine white velvet chenille—there was a sudden revelation of these wonderful works of art! One feels, if the nets show only half as large and thick to a fly’s eye, the spider’s trade must be a poor one. Here is a calculation that will probably interest nobody: 567 feet of pales over 5 feet high, and an average of 18 webs to every 9 feet. It may prove, however, something of the unsuspected multitude of spiders in a given area, though it is nothing to the acres of ploughed land that the level sun-ray of an autumn afternoon will show completely netted over with gossamer. Making the most of a few minutes’ inspection—for I should myself have frozen had I watched much longer these frozen webs—I could see but two varieties of work—the cobweb which usurped the corners, and the beautiful wheel-within-wheel net. In them all one might observe once more that ever-recurring stern immutability of the thing called Instinct. Here, for instance, are two sets of spiders living close neighbours for years together. Each set makes its snares on an opposite plan; and although they cannot help seeing each other’s work continually, neither takes the least hint from the other. The plain cobweb is never made more intricate; the artist of the wheel never dreams that she might do her spinning to a simpler pattern. Happy people! They trouble not their heads about improvements; yet, on looking closer at the last-named webs, there seemed something of the faintest indication of a slight individuality; so far at least, that in a dozen nets there would be five or six worked within a square of four lines, while the remainder had five, tied rather carelessly in a knot below. Perhaps the variation marks two distinct species; or it may be only accidental. Next day every visible trace of the strong beautiful webwork I had so admired was gone with the frost. The spider may have “spread her net abroad with cords” as usual, but there was no magician’s wand to touch it.

*****

The orchard ought to be very gay in the spring. Daffodils have been dropped in all over the turf, and a round patch dug round each Apple tree is to be filled with yellow Wallflowers. This is an experiment, and I do not feel sure that I shall like the flowers so well as the trees simply growing out of the grass. A change, however, is always pleasant; though, perhaps, one might hardly care to lay out the garden differently every year, as the Chinese are said to do. I had a dream, of the orchard grass enamelled with many-coloured Crocuses—in loving reminiscence of certain flowery Olive grounds I know; but after all, the imitation would have been as poor as a winter sky compared to the glowing blue of June. I am not without hope some day—that golden “some day” which so seldom comes—to naturalize in our orchards the real enamelling of the Olive groves—that often-used phrase is too hard in sound and in its usual meaning to express the loveliness of those lilac star Anemones—with here and there a salmon-pink, or a fiery scarlet, blazing like a sun in the living green beneath the trees. I used to think nothing on this earth could come so near a vision of the star-strewn fields of Paradise.