A mantle of spring splendour had fallen upon all. Lines of yellow crocuses shone like threads of gold. Crown Imperials were opening their rich brown, metallic-looking blossoms. Pink and white daphne bushes perfumed the air, and I noted that a host of hungry bees were humming greedily round them. Chionodoxas of all shades, were looking enchantingly fair. The blue Sardensis was opening its petals, of the same wonderful sapphire-blue shade as the Alpine gentian. Then in blossom also I noted Chionodoxa Luciliæ, that had the delicacy and daintiness of a piece of china, and lovely Alleni, that recalled the beauty of a sunset sky when the gold is dying, and when celestial amber is dissolving and melting into exquisite tones of mauve and lavender.
A little later, I found Burbidge hard at work pruning my great bed of hybrid teas, and hybrid perpetual roses, that I have planted with alternate rows of old Dutch and Darwin tulips, with English and Spanish irises, and with lines of grape and Botryoides hyacinths. “Us must get a bit of the bush off,” said my old gardener, as he plied his pruning scissors. I begged him, however, not to cut my hybrid teas too hard, as now so many gardeners are inclined to do, for roses in Shropshire, it seemed to me, did not like too much of the knife, or of the French drastic treatment. “Let it be a rose bush in England,” I pleaded.
“Right you are, ma’am,” replied Burbidge, “for there’s many as uses the knife as a child the whip. Most of the roses here be on their own roots, and so, healthy and abiding. Manetti stuff have blooms big as saucers the first year, but go out the next year like candles as the wind’s overmastered. They be like most fandangles—no stay in them.”
THE VERMILLION ROSE
So saying, my old friend plied his scissors vigorously, and the click, click, resounded all through the garden. Before I left the red-walled garden, I had a word with my old gardener about my hedge of Austrian briars. What a wonderful single rose it is, and the variety is very ancient. Parkinson mentions it in his “Theatre of Plants,” and calls it “the vermilion rose of Austria.” If we prune it this year, we shall get no flowers, I lamented, and I am always very loth to let the pruning shears work their will with my pet rose. Then I turned to my moss roses: pink, white, purple, and the most beautiful variety of all, the old crested. They were all big bushes and must be kept in shape, but should not be pruned in the ordinary sense.
Besides these sorts already named, I grow in my garden the beautiful roses of Japan—the purple and white, and the semi-duplex kinds, all of which bear such superb hips in the autumn. I told Burbidge that we must net some of the bushes in autumn, and that I would try later and get some German recipes for making them into preserves. In Elizabethan days, I have read, “Cooks and their ladies did know how to prepare from hips many fine dishes for their tables.” Burbidge scoffed at this notion. “Let the wild things be, marm,” he said to me; and added, “I never heard of much that was good wild, but nuts.” At this I laughed and replied, “Wait and see—and taste.”
Burbidge told me, that he proposed to carry out the bees in their little wooden houses next week. “Come next Thursday, bee operations should begin,” my old friend assured me. Nine was the hour chosen, and, if fine, “us will have the masks, so that come a breakage the little brown folk can’t come to us—and the vermin make sore flesh of us.” To-day, as I went into the tool-house I heard the bees buzzing angrily, as if they could not keep quiet for anger.
“To-morrow,” Burbidge then informed me, he and the boys would paint all the “bees’ homes over, save the lips, in different colours.” These must, in his language, remain “simple;” but “come Thursday, us will take off the zinc stopper on each, and then the little brown uns can roam as they list.”
All last winter, since November, the bees had lived in the tool-house, and had been artificially fed for the last fortnight, so that, to use my old friend’s words, “they be fair nasty with temper, and buzzin’ like an organ on fire.” And now nothing remained but for Auguste, as he always did, to make them one last meal of burnt sugar, and solemnly to “inviter ces messieurs à faire leur miel.” Their appointed time of liberty was at hand, and in a few days the little brown folk would fly into the sunshine with pæans of joy.
I went into the tool-house with Burbidge. Burbidge is a man of order. Every night he makes “his boys” hang up the tools, after cleaning them with care. Those not in use shine brightly against the wall. Every night they are rubbed clean with a rag steeped in oil. Great strings of onions hung from the massive oak beams. During bad days in winter, when the snow lay on the ground, Burbidge and his men mended the fruit nets, painted the water-cans a brilliant red, or green, made wooden labels, and got ready, as they called it, “for the comin’ of summer.”