A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed.

by W. C. Bartlett

Note, too, that this grafting process reaches over beyond your apple trees. The best races, or sub-divisions of people, come of the best stocks which are continually grafted on. Your blue blood is mixed with more not so blue, or the stock runs out. Down at the root of those apple trees yonder you may find traces of the woolly aphis. It is a sign that the constitution of such trees has been weakened. Digging down you remove the aphis, put fresh soil around the tree, scrape the rusty trunk, cut off the top, and put in two or three grafts from a stock that has vitality; and very soon this rejuvenated tree, bending under its weight of fruit in early Autumn, is something of which no amateur horticulturist need be ashamed. A thoroughbred people will impress language, law, and custom, as none other can upon the world. It is not isolation which secures this result, but the taking of many stocks upon the original trunk. If pulmonary New England is to be physically resuscitated, it will not come of boasting of revolutionary sires, but rather because Germans, Irish, Danes and Swedes are thronging all the avenues of her busy life.

The transition from grafting to budding is natural enough. Those twenty white stakes stand as so many monuments of another horticultural disaster. On a September day, twenty buds, so rare that the original stock could not be bought at any price, had been deftly slipped into as many "suckers," which had come out from the roots of as many rose bushes. The next Spring they were set and staked, and each was about as precious as the right eye of any amateur horticulturist. The small buds had developed into branches a foot long; great double peerless roses had been hanging pendent from the original stocks—roses with regal names and titles. There would have been twenty glorified specimens of floriculture to-day, but for that foreign gardener who had been "educated in the best schools in Europe," who knew everything, and could not be told anything. Roses must be cut in to make new wood. Before night he had clipped those twenty standards each below the bud, and had taken himself off with his diabolical shears, his insufferable conceit, and his rustic innocence. He never came back to look at the work of his hands, nor to hear the wish (mildly expressed) that a pair of shears might be invented which would shorten the stature of that gardener at least a foot. There was a special aggravation of the case, because we had been nursing a theory for years, that by splitting two rose-germs of different kinds, and putting the odd halves together, if growth could then be induced, there would be a hybrid rose—either the color of the one would be distinct on one side, and the other on the opposite side, or the rose would be mottled, having red and white spots on each leaf. This Siamese bud had started finely. Bad luck to the gardener's shears which had abbreviated that experiment and enveloped the vexed question again in darkness. But here is a bed of mottled pinks, and these could have all been the result of crosses. It may be that the humming birds, going from one blossom to another, have mixed the pollen, or some hidden law may be active which cannot be traced. Note, too, that besides this promiscuous fleck of red and white, in not a few instances a single flower will have the red on one-half and the white on the other. The florists call this sporting. The same class of facts may be observed in the double petunias, all of which are hybrids, or nearly so—a purple, white, and red leaf being found in a single flower. There are apples, too (or there were twenty years ago), one-half of which were sour and the other half sweet. The qualities were not interblended, and even the colors were separate.

It was a pretty conceit, and mollifying withal, that a feminine florist connected with pansies: "When you go past them they will turn their heads toward you, greeting you so lovingly." That little myth might be strung on the same string with the buttercup, which only reflects its golden hue upon the chins of those who love June butter.

That alfalfa experiment is only admitted by special grace under the head of floriculture, although the lucerne has no lack of handsome blossoms. A little seed was sprinkled on the ground after the spring rains and forgotten. When the winter rains came again, that alfalfa reached out for both the zenith and nadir. Three times a year it is cut to keep it from falling down. The details are suppressed here, with only an intimation that they are sufficient for several agricultural addresses. If that man is a benefactor who has made two blades of grass grow in the place of one, what is he who has made alfalfa shoot up at the rate of seven tons to the acre, in the place of miserable sorrel-top? But there was a discount upon that experiment. The alfalfa drew to it all the gophers in the neighborhood. They mined and countermined, until the whole area had been honeycombed. They multiplied by scores and hundreds. These rodents drew together all the vagrant cats in the neighborhood, which made this corner of the garden a common hunting ground. Here upon this small area was a crop of alfalfa, a crop of gophers—which no man has numbered to this day—and a crop of cats, as fiercely predatory and as unrelenting in a skirmish as were ever put in battle array. But somehow this experiment has not been satisfactory. It has branched out in too many ways. Two empty arnica bottles suggest the muscular strains which came from moderating those cats with an occasional volley of rocks. And at this writing, half a dozen felines are on the fence looking solemnly down at the sapping and mining which is going on below.

There are no birds in this region which domesticate so readily as the linnets, and which improve more on an intimate acquaintance. They are not so obstreperous as the wren, nor so shy as the lark and the robin. The latter is a migratory bird, coming down to this latitude only in the Winter, and going north for a nesting in the Spring. A single robin has lived in the garden all Winter, becoming nearly as tame as a chicken, following the man with the spading-fork, and snapping up the worms in a sharp competition with his cousin, the brown thrush. The former, in place of any song, has a lonesome and fugitive call, as though waiting for his mate. He is probably a bachelor, who has not yet set up an establishment of his own. A little girl, having gravely considered the case, suggests that he ought to send a letter inviting a mate to come. O, my little friend! oral communication is much more interesting; at least, it was so in our time. Neither was it considered cowardice if the heart came up into the throat.

The linnets are model birds in their domestic life. A pair built a nest last year under the porch, and, having brought up one family of four and dismissed them, the pair furbished up the nest again and brought up a family of four more the same season. They have held secret conferences over the nest recently, and it evidently falls in with their views of domestic economy to use it again. It is possible that they appreciated a little device which we had to adopt for their safety. As the nest was at the extremity of a festoon of vines, there was nothing to hinder the house-cat from going up and feasting on callow birds. An odd lot of trout hooks, fastened to the lower vines, operated as a powerful non-conductor.

Some years ago, a pair of linnets having made their nest in the porch of another house, everything went well until the young had just appeared; then the mother disappeared one night, and the displaced vines in the morning told the whole story. Four orphan birds appealed to the sympathies of the young folk. The nest was taken into the house, the birds carefully covered with cotton, and every effort was made to save them. They would eat nothing, and, as a last resort, the nest was replaced in the vines. The father came back soon, talked with his children, brooded them, fed them day after day, brought them up to maturity, and turned out as prosperous a family of young linnets as there was in that neighborhood. Mr. Linnet can have the most positive certificate of rare domestic virtues. There is the slight drawback that he paints, does all the singing, and is rather vain; while Mrs. Linnet is a plain, unassuming bird, always clad in gray, and is not up in music. All through the realm of ornithology the male bird has the brightest colors and does the singing. But analogy is all at fault when you come to men and women. Who puts on all the bright colors here, paints, and carols upon the topmost bough of the domestic tree? By what law has this order been reversed? And yet the sum of your political economy is, that a woman who can dress more, use pigments more cunningly, and talk faster, and sing better than a man, shall not vote! Is that the way to set up your ideal republic?

One may learn secrets of ornithology in the garden which the books will not yield up. That boy coming up the rear garden walk, who has swung himself into a pear tree to look into the nest of a finch, has done the same thing consecutively on a dozen mornings. He will be able to tell just how many days are required for incubation, and how many days intervene before the birds are full-fledged. I should have had more hope for him as a future ornithologist, had not the young heathen asked for the eggs to put upon his string. There is not such a great difference, after all, between an Apache with a string of scalps at his belt, and a school boy with his string of birds' eggs. If it were not for that infernal cruelty which has been inbred by false teaching, or no teaching, our relations with all the lower forms of life would be intimate and confidential, instead of suspicious and oftentimes revolting. One can match the worst specimens of cannibalism by pointing out strings of larks hung up by their bills any day in the market. I know of no cannibal who ever became ferocious enough to eat singing birds, or to find pleasure in killing them.

There are two or three notes in the song of the lark which are not surpassed in sweetness by any of the oriole or finch family. If one will take a dash into the country some bright morning, on horseback, and note how this joyous bird goes before him, alighting on the fence and calling down a benediction from the heavens, either he will come back filled with gladness, or his liver trouble has got the best of him. All the song birds of much note in this State may be assigned to the three families of thrushes, orioles and finches. In the first of these we have the robin; in the second, the lark; and in the third, the linnet. The sub-families will reach nearly a hundred, and there is not one of them which will not pay in songs and in the destruction of insects for all the mischief he does. Now, a bird that pays his bills in advance, has a right to protection. Observe, too, how soon they recognize any attempt to establish friendly relations with them. Last year a finch had her feet entangled by a string with which she had lined her nest. A little help rendered to set her free, made her an intimate friend, and a shallow pan of water in the grass drew daily dividends of fresh songs. A box with a few holes in it, set on a post, will not remain empty a year; either the blue-birds or the martins will take possession of it.

A garden ought to be planned as much for the birds as for lawns and flowers. The hedges will afford hiding-places for timid birds, and shade on hot days. The tall trees will furnish perches when they want to sing; and a well-fed bird, that has no family trouble on hand, wants to sing nearly all his leisure time. As for the cherries and small fruits, the birds are only gentle communists. If we cannot tolerate a division made with all the inspiration of song, and which leaves us at least one side of the cherry, how are we to tolerate that division predicted by some of the labor prophets, if made with the music of paving-stones and much fragile crockery?