In Orchard Glen

by Mary Esther Miller MacGregor

It was a golden September day when she went up over the hills with a basket of apples from their best tree, and the special jar of her mother's black currant jelly. The air was motionless, the sky a perfect soft unclouded blue, the hills were amber, the hollows amethyst. The branches of the orchard trees behind the village houses sagged, heavy with their harvest, and gay as orchards gotten up for a garden party, all hung with fairy lantern globes of yellow and red. The gardens were filled with ripened corn and great golden pumpkins. The wild asters along the fences glowed softly purple.

Christina stepped over the warm yellow stubble singing, and climbed the hill to the old berry patch, where the briars grew more riotously every year. Gavin's cows were straying through the green and yellow tangle on his side of the fence and a bell rang musically through the still aisles. The Wizard of Autumn had been up here on the hills with his paints and had touched the sumachs along the fences till they looked like trees of flame. And he had been working on a bit of woodbine that now draped the old rail fence as with a scarlet curtain. A blue jay flashed through the golden silence waking the echoes with his noisy laughter and the flickers high up in the dead stumps called jeeringly to each other.

Christina came out of the Slash into the yellow sunshine of Gavin's fields, and as she did so, she suddenly dropped down behind the raspberry bushes that fringed the fence, quite in a panic. For a loud musical voice arose from the field just beyond the brow of the hill, Gavin was ploughing the back meadow and singing, and the song made Christina's heart heat hotly:

"Will ye gang to the Hielan's, Leezie Lindsay?
Will ye gang to the Hielan's wi' me?"

Hidden by the hill, and the screening bushes, she slipped away and took a devious course down the valley. But there was a lump in her throat as she went.

She ran past a clump of cedars and came out into view of Craig-Ellachie. The Grant Girls had given their home this name because of its association with their clan's history, but Nature had encouraged them, for behind the house, set back against the dark pine woods, rose a hill crowned by a towering rock. The cosy old white-washed house was set in the centre of a saucer-like valley. It was the original log house in which their parents had lived and had been added to here and there till it was beautifully picturesque just as the home of the Grant Girls should be.

But visitors to Craig-Ellachie never saw anything else after their first glimpse of the garden.

Every one wondered how it was that the Grant Girls' garden should outbloom all others, and that nobody else ever had any hope of first prize at the Fall fairs. One said it was the sheltered location of the place, others the low elevation, still others that it was the southern slope that made the Craig-Ellachie garden unfold the earliest crocus in Spring and hold safely the latest aster in Autumn. But wise folk, like Christina's mother, always held that it was the tender care of the three gardeners and the sunlight of their presence that made their flowers the wonder of the countryside.

Christina drew a breath of delight as it came into view. Dahlias and asters, rows and rows of them, clumps of feathery cosmos, hedges of flaming gladioli, dazzling golden glow and a dozen others she did not recognise made a glorious array. And the blooms were not confined to the garden proper that was spread out on the south side of the house. They overflowed into the vegetable garden at the back, and spread around the lawn at the front. They strayed away along the fences and completely hedged the orchard. They even encroached upon the barnyard; the manure heap was screened from view by a wall of sunflowers and golden glow and a rainbow avenue of late phlox led down to the pig-pens.

Christina entered by the barnyard and came up through the kitchen garden where rows of cauliflower and cabbage and tomatoes alternated with pansies and mignonette and scarlet salvia. Every bed of onions was fringed with sweet alyssum, and rows of beets were flanked with rosemary and lavender. She opened the little wire gate that led into the garden proper and walked up under a long arched canopy of climbing roses and sweet peas that seemed, like the Grant Girls, to take no heed of the passing of time but bloomed on as though it were June. As she disappeared into its green shade her eye caught a movement in one of the brown fields behind the barn. The two younger sisters were there digging potatoes.