Returning to the home enclosures, we shall find them far from destitute of attraction; and indeed if they have been properly attended to, with a view to that almost unceasing succession of which the various objects of cultivation admit, we shall scarcely as yet perceive any of the ravages which the mere approach of Winter has already made among their uncultivated kindred.
In the Flower Garden, if much of the beauty of Summer has now passed away, its place has been supplied by that which affords one of the pleasantest employments of the lover of gardening; for those who do not grow and collect their own seeds know but half the pleasures of that most delightful of all merely physical occupations. The principal flower seeds come to perfection this month, and are now to be gathered and laid by, before they scatter themselves abroad at random.
Now, too, is the time for employing another and an equally fertile and interesting mode of propagation; that by means of offsets, suckers, cuttings, partings, &c. Now, in short, most of the fibrous-rooted perennial plants (regardless of Mr. Malthus’s principles of population) put forth more offspring than the ground which they occupy can support; and unless the Government under which they live were to provide them with due means of colonization, they would presently over-run and destroy each other, until the whole kingdom, which now belongs to them jointly, became the exclusive property and possession of some one powerful but worthless family among them: as we see on lands that are left to themselves, and suffered to lie waste: whatever variety of plants may spring up spontaneously upon them during the first season or two, at the end of three or four years all is one unbroken expanse of rank unproductive grass.
It may be a childish pleasure, perhaps, but it is a very unequivocal and a very innocent one, to bid the perennial plants “increase and multiply,” and to see how aptly and willingly they obey the mandate. Making plants by this means is a pleasant substitute for making money, to those who have none of the latter to begin with. Indeed I question whether a dozen money-bags, made out of one, ever yet afforded the maker half the real satisfaction that a dozen Daisies have done, multiplied in a similar manner. Not that I can pretend to judge by experience of the comparative merits of these multiplication tables; and I am liberal enough to be willing to give the former a fair trial, on the very first opportunity that offers itself.
But though most of the Garden plants are now busily employed in disseminating themselves by seeds and offsets, many of them are still wearing their merely ornamental attire, and looking about them for admiration as if they were made for nothing else. If the arrangements of the borders have been attended to with a properly prospective eye, they still present us with several of the Amaranths, and particularly the everlasting ones; with some of the finest Dahlias; the great climbing Convolvolus; French and African Marigolds, which have now increased to almost the size of flowering shrubs; Scabious; China-Asters; Golden-rod; the interminable Stocks; and, running about among them all, and flowering almost as profusely and as prettily as ever, sweet-breathing Mignonette.
Among the Shrubs, too, there are still some whose flowers continue to look the coming Winter in the face. In particular, the Arbutus is in all its beauty,—hanging forth, like the Orange, its flowers, fruit, and leaves, all at once. The Ivy, too, is covered with its unassuming blossoms, which are as rich in honey as they are poor in show, and are rifled of their sweets by the all-wooing bees, with even more avidity than the fantastical Passion-flower, or the flaunting Rose.
It is a little singular that the most gorgeous show which the Garden presents during the whole year should occur at this late period of the season, and without the intervention of flowers. I allude to the splendid foliage of the Great Virginian Creeper, which may now be seen hanging out its scarlet banners against some high battlement, or wreathing them into gay and graceful tapestry about the mouldering walls of some old watch-tower, or, still more appropriately, fringing and festooning the embayed windows of some secluded building, sacred to the silence of study and contemplation. If I remember rightly, some beautiful examples of it, under the latter character, may be seen in two or three of the inner quadrangles both of Oxford and Cambridge.
Finally, now, that at once wildest and tamest of birds, most social and most solitary, the Robin, first begins to place its trust in man; flitting about the feet of the Gardener, as he turns up the freshened earth, and taking its food almost from the spade as it moves in his hand; or standing at a little distance from him among the fallen leaves, and singing plaintively, as if practising beforehand the dirge of the departing year.
October is to London what April is to the Country; it is the Spring of the London Summer, when the hopes of the shopkeeper begin to bud forth, and he lays aside the insupportable labour of having nothing to do, for the delightful leisure of preparing to be in a perpetual bustle. During the last month or two he has been strenuously endeavouring to persuade himself that the Steyne at Brighton is as healthy as Bond-street; the pavé of Pall Mall no more picturesque than the Pantiles of Tunbridge Wells; and winning a prize at one-card-loo at Margate as piquant a process as serving a customer to the same amount of profit. But now that the time is returned when “business” must again be attended to, he discards with contempt all such mischievous heresies, and re-embraces the only orthodox faith of a London shopkeeper—that London and his shop are the true “beauteous and sublime” of human life. In fact, “now is the winter of his discontent” (that is to say, what other people call Summer) “made glorious Summer” by the near approach of Winter; and all the wit he is master of is put in requisition, to devise the means of proving that every thing he has offered to “his friends the public,” up to this particular period, has become worse than obsolete. Accordingly, now are those poets of the shopkeepers, the investors of patterns, “perplexed in the extreme;” since, unless they can produce a something which shall necessarily supersede all their previous productions, their occupation’s gone.