I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! Down again to the good brown earth!
It is with positive satisfaction that I stand [pg 088] and survey my beds, great bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.
There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and the successes shall [pg 089] be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to look them up—yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half covered with honeysuckle.
Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted, but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept seeds of this year’s poppies—funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure [pg 090] that even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.
Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for next year but for the year after. Next year’s bloom is secured—unless they winter-kill—in this year’s young plants, growing since spring, or even since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer’s beauty. But for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then need the early start given by fall sowing.
As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures—young plants, seedlings from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust to the youngsters to fill [pg 091] their places. These, and English daisies, I let grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.
When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!
My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.
Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in August, a few years ago, I discovered [pg 092] under the shade of an old crab tree, two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.
Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of [pg 093] all is it on moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with their intermittent burring of furry wings.