A garden party is for all ages; so there should be in our uncertain climate full provision for the elderly, who can not always spend an afternoon on the lawn. Broad piazzas are very useful, and much enjoyed by those who fear our treacherous malarious soil; and if one can not exercise, it is better to sit on a piazza than on the grass.
As it is always prone to rain at picnics and garden parties, it is better to have the refreshments in the house. Gentlemen can run into the banquet-hall and get a plate of lobster-salad for a lady, or the waiters can carry the refreshments about; but for a sudden shower of rain to descend on a table is miserable, and defeats the object of the table.
The lady of the house, however, often improvises a hasty roof or covering for her table, put up by the carpenter at a small outlay, if she is determined to have everything al fresco. Frozen coffee, iced tea, punch, ice-cream croquets, salads, jellies, pressed turkey, potted meats, pâté de foie gras, and sandwiches, are spread about. Do not attempt any hot dishes at a garden party; they are out of place, and impossible.
The garden party is said to be “the first hybrid which unites society and nature.” It is a growing taste with us Americans, and will grow to be a greater favorite as time goes on. The popularity of the game of archery, that relic of Robin Hood and Maid Marion, “that vision of Lincoln green,” is now added to lawn tennis, croquet, and “les Graces,” as one of the most popular features of a garden party. One would think that there was nothing needed but the long sweep of the trees upon the lawn, the vision of the distant city, the flower-beds where geraniums and calceolaria vie in color, the “pleached alley,” the buttercup in the grass, the Watteau-like picture, or groups of gay ladies and gallant cavaliers causing “unpremeditated effects” to make the garden party agreeable. But there is always a need of preparation for such a party. No lady should trust alone to the power of her guests to amuse themselves. She must do all that she can.
In the country a lady can wait for a day of fine weather, and invite her guests only the day before. The grounds and garden walks, the lawn tennis, the archery, should all be in order, and a few chairs out under the trees. It is not long before all her guests begin to enjoy themselves in their own way, and to appreciate how much better a room is made by the Gothic arch of the trees than by any sort of cramped-up house arrangement.
One can be more general in the invitations to a garden party than to any other; for if people like each other they can group together, and if they do not, they can easily walk apart, and get rid of each other. In a small room, particularly at a dinner party, how two people can glow and glare at each other, to the dreadful dismay of the hostess! But at a garden party Nature is too wide for them. They are almost obliged to seem amused whether they are or not. If not at all amused, they can, however, go and sulk under the lilacs. Those fragrant vegetables will not care whether the guests sulk or smile.
Every country house has its charms. How lovely a garden party can be given at the Locusts, when all those trees are in flower, sending down the perfume of Araby the Blest! How the perfume reminds one of St. John’s Gardens, Oxford, when the lime-trees are in bloom, and every bough is laden with wild bees who make a music as they sip! A flowering tree is the most perfect thing which Adam and Eve saved from Paradise. One seems, in inhaling its fragrance, to have just recovered from a long illness.
The best part of a spring or early summer garden party is this first whiff of fragrance which is brought to the disused or insulted nostril of the city. We little know until then how the most aristocratic of the senses has been wronged. We are always, and all of us, most patient over our city bad smells until we go into the country and realize what a bath of delicious odors a forest is—a bit of woodland, a field of growing grass, one sweet cherry-tree, an apple-blossom, a violet! The perfume of lilacs is the perfume of luxury; and the first scythe of the mower, as it sweeps through the young blood of the grass, reveals a thousand scent-bottles all uncorked for our use. A lady in giving a garden party should always have a bundle of new-mown hay somewhere about the grounds.
And at the garden party what may not those who sit on the benches remember? All the sprightly, frivolous, charming figures who seem to have posed for us at garden parties in France! Philippe d’Orléans and La Phalaris; the Duc de Richelieu and the Abbess de Chelles; Watteau, Voltaire, Carmargo; Louis XV, with Pompadour and Du Barry; Boucher and Vanloo; Greuze, Voisenon, and Bernis; Guimaud and Sophie Arnould; Crébillon, the tragic, and Dancourt, the gay! What a faithful study of naiads and hamadryads did the beautiful women of these days suggest to the artists at those garden parties when, toward the end of spring, the trees were in blossom, and the enameled grass carpeted the parks! Madame de Pompadour asked Louis XV to come and see her hermitage! Venus, Hebe, Diana the huntress, the three Graces—all were in order! The garden itself a masterpiece of attraction—a wood, rather than a garden—a wood peopled with statues, formed of verdant and odorous arcades, of charming groves, of dark, shaded retreats. Such was the Parc aux Cerfs.