CHAPTER II
THE EARLY WINDOW-BOX
“Yet sun and wind, what can ye do
But make the leaves more brightly show?”
Since Londoners have learned that life without scent and colour is not worth living, England’s capital has become a City of Flowers. It is not only Covent Garden and the great floral shops of the West End that blaze with blossoms; the same idea has spread into every little outlying suburb, wherein no self-respecting greengrocer, however small his frontage, would fail to fill a shelf or two with fresh-cut flowers several times a week. Here every careful housewife holds her Saturday marketing incomplete till she has bought the bunch of sweetness that is destined to adorn the Sunday sitting-room or grace the midday meal. Cold winds of wintry spring may blow, but, wrapped in folds of pale green tissue (which sets them off amazingly), bright yellow Daffodils, purple Violets, white Narcissus, or branches of the almond-sweet Mimosa, are carried through the streets by thousands.
All this is delightful; but cut flowers, lovely and decorative as they are, can never satisfy the deeper necessities of the soul. We admire them, we enjoy them, but it can hardly be said we love them; they are too strange to us, like new friends that we have not had time to cultivate, but must let go ere we know them. As we agreed just now, really to enjoy a flower we must have grown it.
In London and all large towns gardening has its trials. Many will not attempt the task, and rely wholly on the cut flowers of the florist or the daintily filled pots and baskets he sells us, the blossoms in which last hardly longer than those we buy by handfuls. What are the inhabitants of flats and tall town tenements to do when they long for the joys of a little gardening—real gardening—and have not so much as a bit of a back-yard to call their own? Well, even in towns and cities, where there is a will there is a way. One or two alternatives are open to us; one is the Window-box, another is the Roof-garden, and there is the Balcony.
The window-box is both the easiest and the most general, but, common as are these town adornments, it is a matter of fact that very little “gardening” is done in them. For the most part the man in the street gets as much æsthetic enjoyment out of a window-box as its owner, and often, except in the matter of payment, has about as much to do with it. The lordly mansions, in front of which are displayed the most beautiful colour-schemes during the fashionable season, are often closed at other periods of the year, while their owners are away enjoying flowers in distant places. It is of the window-gardening of that far larger class that lives in London all the year round we would say a word or two. Window-gardening might become ten times more interesting than it is now if people only woke up to a sense of its possibilities.
Too frequently the window-boxes of the million follow the fashions that are set them by the “ton,” and come out radiant only with the dawn of summer. True, in some cases, the baldness of winter and early spring is mitigated by the planting of a few small shrubs, green or variegated; but not infrequently so little interest is taken in them that the poor things are allowed to wither on their stems, either parched with thirst or frozen with cold. One would almost prefer the sight of the clean, quite empty flower-box, which does, at any rate, give a sense of rest.