Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

III.

FLOWER-FARMING.

February 29th, 1868.

I acknowledge the merits of flower-gardening, but a kind of necessity has compelled me to practice flower-farming. I do not live upon my little farm, on the Hudson, except for a few months in midsummer. To keep a professional gardener befits more ample means than mine. Yet I must have flowers; I am as set and determined to have flowers as my farmer, Mr. Turner, is to have vegetables; and there is a friendly quarrel on hand all the season, a kind of border warfare, between flowers and vegetables, which shall have this spot, and which shall secure that nook; whether in this southern slope it shall be onions or gladioluses; whether a row of lettuce shall edge that patch, or of asters. I think, on a calm review, that I have rather gained on Mr. Turner. The fact is, I found that he had me at advantage, being always on the place, and having the whole spring to himself. So I shrewdly tampered with the man himself, and before he knew what he was about, I had infected him with the flower mania (and this is a disorder which I have never known cured); so that I had an ally in the very enemy’s camp. Indeed, I begin to fear that my manager will get ahead of me yet in skill and love of flowers!

I can see many and sufficient reasons for parterres of flowers, for borders of mixed plants, for clumps and ribbons; but I can see no reason for supposing that flowers grow to advantage only in these formal methods.

In a plantation of tomatoes, if every alternate plant in the outer row is a petunia you will find a charming effect in the red fruit of the one and the profuse blossoming of the other; and on these outer rows the tomatoes may be left to ripen

for seed, as being more exposed to the sun, thus adding the beauty of their rich color.

I do not know why a square plat of beets or onions may not be edged with asters, or with balsams. Sometimes I plant a few alternate rows of flowers with my root crops, and find that carrots and stocks, alternated, are admirable friends. When the main crops are in, there are always some outlying edges, some places about the walls, which would be surely filled in with cabbages, if I did not jump at the chance. I have great luck with tropealums, nasturtiums, and particularly with labias, which are as easy of culture, on a farm, as a bean. And I have a fancy that when one comes upon a heap of stones in a corner, covered over with all varieties of tropealum, he takes more pleasure in them than if found just where one would look for them, in a flower-bed.

If I should lay down a rule, it would be that, in arable land, or in shrubbery and forest, no man should have to walk more than twenty paces to find a flower. If a lady should meet you on any acre on your farm, you ought to be able then and there to make up for her an acceptable bouquet.

In an unexpected way, I am like to have my rule kept for me. For, in autumn, the stems and haulms of flowers go to the barn-yard and join all other stuff fit for compost; and when, in the spring, it is hauled out, I find, on every part of the farm, that stray seeds have shaken out, and sown themselves, and produced volunteer flowers. Indeed, the primrose family are getting too familiar; larkspurs are everywhere; coreopsis glitters all over the fields; poppies have turned vagrants; and the portulacca has fairly become a weed. Farms should be carried on for profit and pleasure; and, as I fail in the former, I am determined to make up in the latter element.