Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and, with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space. Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year, or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious, either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds for itself.
There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its foliage. I take them up and set [pg 094] them out near the main phlox masses, and wait for the next season’s blossoming before I give them their final place.
This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.
As I am thus occupied,—digging, planting, thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant Antæus for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.
But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.
For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young [pg 096] foxgloves, I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I thin my forget-me-not I see it—in my mind’s eye—in a blue mist of spring bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me afresh—after frost.